Dirty Three / Low, Obvious Is Obvious / No Need

And finally, it's hard to tell from the packaging which of these two songs comes first on the disc, but it takes only a few seconds of "Obvious Is Obvious" to tell that it's not a Low song. For any other band it's a dangerously slow and quiet song, but for Low the stately violins are garish, the lugubrious pace is hyperkinetic, and the muted guitar chords are inexcusably brash. The contrast, when "No Need" actually starts (if you can call it that), with its unvarying war-drum-funeral-march percussion, strangled vocal and but the faintest ghost of a guitar part, is profound. I'm not even sure if it makes sense to call what Low does "making" music. It's less like something they do, and more like what's left when they block everything else out. If silence can have weight, then Low's music is like aural judo, and "No Need" is their demonstration that no amount of soundlessness is a match for proper leverage.